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June in Review

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I read 7 books last month, which is about half of my average. It’s not at all a surprise, though, considering that June contained 2 large events—Vacation Bible School, for which I’m a director, early in the month and my husband and my 25th wedding anniversary, which involved a vow renewal and party at the end of the month. I was busy a lot of the month between the planning for both of these and the week of VBS itself being very tiring in its own right. My husband and I were gone for a week at the beginning of July as well, which is why this post is so much later than normal and contributes to the reason that I have written only 1 review for the books I read in June. I’ve got some catching up to do (and not just on book reviews).

Here are the books I read in June:

Shell Shocked
Carpenter 31
Alcatraz Escape
Boxcar 1
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Poirot 14
Stellar
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Shell Shocked by Kathleen Welton (1 / 5)
Dogged Pursuit by David Rosenfelt
The Alcatraz Escape by Jennifer Chambliss Bertman
The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner
The Truth About Stacey by Ann M. Martin
Murder in Mesopotamia by Agatha Christie
Stellar English by Frank L. Cioffi

This list includes 3 ARCs and 2 re-reads. My favorite book from June was The Alcatraz Escape. I started 1 series, continued 3 series, and finished 1 series. My ever-changing short list of to-be-reads, as well as a flag for the book I’m currently reading and an ongoing list of those I’ve read and posted about can be found here.

I’m also keeping my Goodreads page updated with a more extensive list of to-be-reads. Despite my almost too-long TBR list, I’m always looking for more to add. Feel free to offer suggestions of your favorites or just recent reads you enjoyed.

Book Review: Shell Shocked

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Shell Shocked
by Kathleen Welton

My rating: 1 / 5
Genre: YA mystery

The synopsis I read for this book talked about turtles with strange markings on their shells, mysterious bioluminescence, and an investigation led by friends Alex and Avery. So I was expecting puzzles and detecting, but it was really just a long PSA about tourists and poachers endangering the environment. The bioluminescence is only mentioned maybe once, and the strange markings on the turtle shells are just…gashes made by boat motors? I think? It was really confusing. 

The author didn’t seem to pay much attention to her own book as she wrote. The turtle with strange markings on its shell is similar to one Alex saw in the rescue center she works at, which I thought would end up being part of the mystery, but by the next day, the turtle at the center is never mentioned again. Other elements are discovered and don’t go anywhere as well. And though I don’t mean to diminish the real-world plight of wildlife being poached and killed by careless people, the tone of the book was just so much more dire than I felt that the story required. In the end, this felt like a passion project for someone who has lived on or visited an island like that in the book and is concerned about the wildlife there, which is fine if you’re the right audience for it. I am not.

I received a copy of this book for free from the author in exchange for an honest review.

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If you’ve read this book, or read it in the future, feel free to let me know what you think!

May in Review

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I read 9 books last month, which was definitely a low month for me. There were a few longer books in there, but since my overall page count was lower than average too, I just read less in general.

Here are the books I read in May:

Inheritance Games
wing 4
Face of Death
Navigator
Swimming
Harry August
Carpenter 15
Misplaced

The Inheritance Games by Jennifer Lynn Barnes (3.5 / 5)
The Warden and the Wolf King by Andrew Peterson (5 / 5)
Face of Death by Blake Pierce (3 / 5)
The Navigator by Pittacus Lore (4 / 5)
The ABC Murders by Agatha Christie (4.5 / 5)
Night Swimming by Aaron Starmer (3.5 / 5)
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North (4 / 5)
The Twelve Dogs of Christmas by David Rosenfelt (4 / 5)
Misplaced Threats by Alan Zimm (4 / 5)

This list includes 2 ARCs and 2 re-reads. My favorite book from May was The ABC Murders. I started 1 series, continued 2 series, and finished 1 series. My ever-changing short list of to-be-reads, as well as a flag for the book I’m currently reading and an ongoing list of those I’ve read and posted about can be found here.

I’m also keeping my Goodreads page updated with a more extensive list of to-be-reads. Despite my almost too-long TBR list, I’m always looking for more to add. Feel free to offer suggestions of your favorites or just recent reads you enjoyed.

Book Review: Misplaced Threats

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Misplaced Threats
by Alan Zimm

My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: Sci-fi

From the official synopsis: Decades after The Shift, 17 Systems were locked into an entrenched authoritarian government ruled by gene-selected elites. ‘The 35 ‘royal’ Families and 50 Great Corporations control the Federated government, as a self-centered tyranny, the very definition of fascism.

Mike just wants to open a restaurant to earn some money. Ghost just wants to be left alone to live his life and breathe oxygen without being fined. But they, along with many others, learn that the system is not set up to work for them, to help them in any way, or to care about anyone but the elite.

I struggled to write the synopsis for this book, because I struggle to explain the main plot. A lot of characters are introduced early on, though eventually Mike and Ghost rise to the top as the two biggest characters (Mike being the main, in my mind). Almost everything else in the book was some kind of support to their stories, minus one side plot that I think could have easily been cut and the book wouldn’t have lost anything. Even though I wasn’t sure what the main plot was though, I enjoyed the book overall. I’m not a space opera expert by any means, but I really appreciated the world building in this book. Major and minor details worked together really well, and I felt immersed in the overall setting. More specifically, Mike’s restaurant is amazing! There’s a lot of creativity there, and it’s one of the reasons I was always happy to go back to Mike’s POV.

The author is great with characters and dialog. Conversations, especially between patrons of Mike’s restaurant, feel completely realistic. Part of that is also involved in the world building I mentioned earlier—being futuristic and set far from Earth, there would have to be a lot of different terminology, and there is, yet I never felt bogged down by it. In fact, there are even quite a few pop-culture references in the book, and even some more obscure references (one of which particularly amazed me), and they actually fit in really well.

My biggest issue with this book, aside from the one side plot I mentioned earlier than didn’t seem like it added much and was pretty anti-climactic and unsatisfying, is the heavy sci-fi elements. This type of sci-fi is not something I normally read, so it may be completely normal, but I did a lot of skimming throughout the book when piloting of ships, specifics about the mechanics of the food delivery in the restaurant, things like that, got too detailed. I knew I wasn’t going to follow it anyway. But overall, I enjoyed the book and hope that the author is going to continue the series (the first one was originally published in 2023) so I can read more about these characters and (fingers crossed) maybe a little more about the side plot that I felt went nowhere. And one more thing—this book is self-published, and though I’d imagine a publisher may have made some changes to the style and flow, it avoids many of the annoyances that I often find in self-published books. If you’re interested in reading this book, I’d recommend it.

I received a copy of this book for free from the author in exchange for an honest review.

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If you’ve read this book, or read it in the future, feel free to let me know what you think!

Book Review: The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

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The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
by Claire North
read by Peter Kenny

My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: Speculative fiction

When a little girl visits Harry August on his deathbed and tells him that the world is ending, he takes the message with him to the grave…and then into his next life. Harry is one of a small number of people who live their lives over and over again—dying only to be born again in the same place and time as their previous lives. Harry never sees the future, but the dire message has been passed back from the future, and now it’s up to Harry to do something about it.

This book is going to be difficult to review. I’ll say up front that I enjoyed it, even while being a little uncertain about what was going on for much of it. Now I’ll go into more detail about my journey with this book: My husband got the audiobook for me a while back, thinking it was something that would interest me, but it took me a while to get to it, mostly because the synopsis is fairly vague and didn’t grab my attention more than the general question of how the whole “multiple lives” thing works. When I started listening to it recently, I appreciated that the author starts with a decent hook, that being the little girl telling Harry on his deathbed that the world is ending, the end is coming faster, and that it’s up to him to do something. But then it hits the brakes from there to give us Harry’s backstory, and the pace is quite slow for a while. The thing is though…I don’t really remember ever being bored. And I think that’s because the author intersperses information about some of Harry’s later lives, even while talking about his first life, which is the one before he found out that he was going to go on to live multiple lives, and thus the “boring” one.

I labeled this novel as speculative fiction, and I think that actually fits more than one way. It’s certainly some kind of fantasy or sci-fi that sets up the world in which some people live their lives over and over again. But the plot itself is basically full of speculation about how a person might spend their time if they did live their life over and over again. For the longest time, I wasn’t really sure what the main plot or conflict was going to turn out to be, but even as I waited for it to develop, I didn’t mind the meandering. Then when it showed up, I was completely hooked for the rest of the book. Though even then, it slowed down a bit after that. Even then, the author would still pause the narrative for a moment to jump to a different time in Harry’s timeline—sometimes that would feel a little jarring, but most of the time, I appreciated the connection the author was making. The ending was completely satisfying, except I was left with just one question, which would be a spoiler to include. (If you’re curious enough to know what my question is, check out my review on Goodreads, where I could put it behind a spoiler tag.)

I worry that my review might be a little confusing, but it’s probably fitting, considering the nature of this book. Overall, I will just say that I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I should as I listened. My main complaint is the major slow-downs along the way here and there, plus there was some unnecessary political commentary. The narrator, Peter Kenny, is pretty amazing and a great choice for this book, considering that Harry’s lives take him all over the world, so there are quite a few different accents incorporated. This is the kind of book that I fully intend to listen to again some time, because knowing more about Harry’s situation and the worldbuilding, I’ll probably catch more in the details early on. Since it’s difficult to explain what the book is about and what kind of genre(s) it fits into, it’s difficult to know who to recommend it to. I will say, though, that it reminded me a bit of The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, at least in the mechanics of the worldbuilding, so there would probably be a crossover in fans there. Outside of that, if you have any interest in the book after reading my review (or before reading it), I do recommend it.

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If you’ve read this book, or read it in the future, feel free to let me know what you think!

Book Review Podcast Episode 20

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In episode 20, we review The Unbreakable Code, book 2 in the Book Scavenger series by Jennifer Chambliss Bertman and North! Or Be Eaten, book 2 in the Wingfeather Saga by Andrew Peterson. Also, Kristi reviews The Inheritance Games by Jennifer Lynn Barnes and Lena reviews The Seat Beside Me by Nancy Moser, both originally reviewed by the opposite person in episode #2.

In case it wasn’t already clear that we’re not professionals, this podcast was recorded in segments at different times, and the fact that we’ve had to change microphone set-ups throughout the months we’ve done the podcast is pretty obvious in this update episode.

Also available on Spotify:

Book Review: The ABC Murders

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The ABC Murders
Hercule Poirot #13
by Agatha Christie
read by Hugh Fraser

My rating: 4.5 / 5
Genre: Classic mystery

The story of the magnanimous serial killer was one of the better Poirot novels I’ve read so far. Christie pulled me in and had me looking exactly where she wanted me looking, which was in the wrong direction. I did start to realize my mistake before the turn came in the book, and I was pretty excited to realize there was more going on. I didn’t guess the culprit or the motives behind the murders, though—my theories were pretty far off—but I still had a lot of fun coming up with them and then learning how wrong I was. It was also nice to see Hastings back. Though several of the Poirot books have been less enjoyable for me, gems like this make my quest to keep listening worthwhile.

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Book Review: The Navigator

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The Navigator
Lorien Legacies: The Lost Files #11
by Pittacus Lore

My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: YA sci-fi

Spoiler notice: The following review may contain spoilers for the main series, starting with I Am Number Four.

Decades before the main series begins, when the Mogodorian attack begins on Lorien, Lexa is conscripted to fly an old-fashioned space ship in an attempt to escape. Once on Earth, she and her companions must try to track down the other Loric that made it off the planet, but more than that, they have to survive in this alien world.

I don’t remember having any particular attachment to Lexa when reading the main series or wondering about her backstory, but this was still an interesting read. I appreciated seeing Lorien before and during the invasion and also getting an idea of the culture and political climate from the perspective of someone who actually lived there. I enjoyed this novella a little more than the previous, which could be due in part to Sarah (my least favorite of the major characters from the main series) not being involved at all. For those who have read and enjoyed the main series and want to revisit the world, you definitely consider reading this as well.

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Book Review: Face of Death

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Face of Death
by Blake Pierce

My rating: 3 / 5
Genre: Crime drama

Zoe Prime is an FBI agent with the ability to see everything in numbers, measurements, patterns, etc. She does her best to keep this side of her hidden from co-workers, even while using it to solve crimes. But when a series of murders seems to have no pattern, Zoe is worried she won’t be able to stop the killer before he completes his spree.

The mystery aspect of this book was decent overall. Murders are shown from the POV of the soon-to-be-dead, which is an interesting style choice. It lends itself to some fairly disturbing scenes, when the attack occurs and the victim becomes aware of his/her impending death. The killer also has some POV scenes, which I felt may have taken away some of the suspense of the mystery. Because in the end, Zoe’s work to solve the crime ends up feeling like a rehashing of what we already know from the killer’s POV. And I think I would have liked a little more explanation as to the motives in the end.

Zoe understandably has some major social shortcomings, which I can relate to, though hers take a different shape than mine. What bothered me the most was the fact that she felt she had to hide her ability, which was really an incredible boon for her job. I think the author attempted to make sense of that by giving her some trauma about her ability from her childhood, but even in that, I was annoyed, because it was an unnecessary poke at Christianity. Zoe’s mom claimed Zoe’s abilities were from the devil. Zoe’s mom was “strictly religious, and that meant intolerant.” A very tolerant statement on the author’s part… And frankly, just not great writing, because it’s a weak argument for why Zoe needs to hide her investigatively helpful abilities from her colleagues and superiors.

In the end, this book wasn’t for me on multiple fronts. It wasn’t a bad book, and for a book that is either self-published or at least published with a super small press, it’s decently edited. It could have been paced better, but it’s clear from other reviews that this book (and the following series) has an audience that I’m just not part of. If it sounds like something you’d be interested in, please check out other reviews at the link below.

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If you’ve read this book, or read it in the future, feel free to let me know what you think!